Thursday, January 25, 2007

Give Democrats credit. They campaigned on a legislative agenda. They won on it. They delivered it in fewer than 100 hours — according to Nancy Pelosi’s clock.

Lesson to Republicans: It really is that easy. Once upon a time, the GOP leadership understood that lesson. Forty years of wandering in the minority desert led Republicans to the political promised land in the 1990s. Perhaps a shorter sojourn will suffice this time.

But having completed their legislative imperatives before the month of January is out, Democrats now face an important question: What next? Not to diminish the importance of, say, halving the interest rate on student loans, but there are a few significant issues the Democrat-controlled Congress hasn’t begun to touch.

Rep. Rahm Emanuel, (D-IL), who served as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee last year, was the principal architect of his party’s stunning victory in November. He is today chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.

In a recent interview with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, Emanuel spelled out the Democratic leadership’s legislative agenda for the rest of 2007: energy independence and better health care for children.

If it’s true that Democrats have already finished with their highest priority agenda items, the this will be a short-lived House majority for them. I know that they’ve got other items on the agenda but they aren’t popular at all.

We learned that ending religious profiling was on their agenda when John Conyers ‘coincidentally’ produced a resolution the day after the Flying Imam Fiasco broke just before Thanksgiving. Here’s what we found out from Investors Business Daily:

Granting Muslims “special civil-rights protections in this post-9/11 world won’t fly. In fact, I’d bet that the Senate would think of that as so radioactive that they wouldn’t even grant it a committee hearing. It’s difficult to imagine a legitimate reason why a newly elected majority would squander their political capital on such a loser of an issue. Then again, we’re talking about John Conyers and Nancy Pelosi, who don’t have a reputation of having a high political IQ.

The truth is that Jonathan has highlighted something that was apparent last fall. Democrats didn’t run on a true agenda. Their campaign was based on “We’re not like Republicans”, which is true. As bad as Republicans were this past couple of years, the newly-minted Democrat majority is far worse.

Sawyer: But short of that, questions posed, resolutions passed, short of that, are you acquiescing in the surge if the pocketbook is the only other control mechanism?

Pelosi: The president knows that because the troops are in harm’s way, that we won’t cut off the resources. That’s why he’s moving so quickly to put them in harm’s way, but we will hold the president accountable. He has to answer for his war.

The truth is that Pelosi is treading water because she knows that Democrats don’t have a coherent policy on Iraq. They can’t have a coherent policy because the Pacifist Left of their party is so militant that they won’t let Democrats develop a coherent strategy for winning any war.